Memo from Bari Weiss causes confusion at CBS News
To write or not to write?
CBS News employees grappled with conflicting orders Monday, according to three people familiar with the matter, after some producers at the Paramount Skydance news unit urged reporters and journalists to respond to an eyebrow-raising memo from new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, who drew criticism from the Writers Guild of America last week. In the memo, Weiss asked her employees to tell her “how you spend your work hours” and what they thought of CBS News so that she and the editorial staff could “get aligned on achieving a shared vision for CBS News.”
Within hours of the memo surfacing, the WGA advised CBS News union members not to respond to the letter until CBS provided more details about what its purpose was, including whether their responses could serve as “a basis for discipline, dismissal or dismissal.”
Weiss was named editor-in-chief of CBS News last week by Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, and the CBS News staff has been in turmoil ever since. Weiss, a digital entrepreneur and opinion writer who built The Free Press, has no experience running a mainstream TV news channel, and little history of helping traditional journalists navigate the challenges of finding facts. She has a direct line to Ellison, while Tom Cibrowski, a former ABC executive who came on board as CBS News president earlier this year, is tasked with working with Weiss and lending his expertise.
CBS News declined to make executives available for comment.
The Paramount news drama unfolds as most employees fear they will lose their jobs. Paramount executives have said they plan to significantly reduce the company’s workforce to reduce costs. Details about the staff layoffs are expected to be revealed in Paramount’s next earnings report.
One person familiar with the newsroom said the staffers were facing “mass confusion” because they were urged by some of their superiors to submit notes to Weiss, and their union told them the exact opposite. Some producers are not covered by a union contract at CBS News and may feel pressure to push employees to follow the new boss’s orders, people familiar with the matter said.
There’s good reason to shake up CBS News. The division has suffered in recent years under a parade of senior executives, none of whom have been able to buck recent trends and gain traction over the weekday standards “CBS Evening News” and “CBS Mornings,” which remain in third place compared to time-slot competitors from NBC News and ABC News. At the same time, CBS News already enjoys hard-won trust among a large group of viewers, and ‘CBS Sunday Morning’ and ’60 Minutes’ are some of the best-known news brands on TV. Among American adults who have at least some trust in the information they get from national news organizations, 51% trust CBS News, according to the Pew Research Center. Only ABC News and NBC News have more confidence among this group, and CBS News is tied with both CNN and PBS.
